Culture
How New York Liberty’s length could be WNBA semifinals key: ‘It looks like an NBA roster’
NEW YORK — The final basket of Breanna Stewart’s 34-point clinic on Sunday to open the WNBA semifinals was never going to be blocked. Las Vegas Aces forward A’ja Wilson tried — elevating as high as she could as the seconds ticked down on both the shot and game clock — but the New York Liberty star skied over Wilson’s outstretched arms.
With just over a minute remaining in New York’s eventual 87-77 victory, Stewart elevated for a runner. A step in front of the free-throw line, she leaped, flicked the basketball with her right hand and watched it carom off the backboard and drop into the hoop.
Stewart ran back down the floor emphatically nodding her head after her basket served as a delightful dagger enjoyed by the sellout Barclays Center crowd of more than 14,000 fans.
New York puts the dagger in Game 1 😤
Stewie floater.
Jonquel MONSTER block.#WNBAPlayoffs presented by @Google pic.twitter.com/TuFCI6x75T— WNBA (@WNBA) September 29, 2024
What happened next wasn’t surprising either. Stewart deflected a layup by Aces guard Kelsey Plum.
Stewart’s arms were everywhere on Sunday — during that late-game sequence, on numerous New York offensive possessions in which she knocked down nearly unguardable mid-range jumpers, on defensive switches and when her arms got into passing lanes. “Sometimes the ball might be out of reach, but (I’m) still able to make a play,” Stewart said.
Plum might have scored 24 points to lead Las Vegas, but she was only focused on the loss. “That’s the only thing that I really see,” she said.
Sunday’s result was largely because of another L-word: Length.
That New York’s length was impactful wasn’t exactly a surprise. Heading into the series, both teams recognized the other as familiar foes. New York swept its three regular-season meetings against Las Vegas, and, of course, there was history between them last year. The Liberty won the 2023 Commissioner’s Cup over the Aces, and later, more importantly, the Aces defeated the Liberty for the 2023 WNBA championship.
Las Vegas knows what to expect against New York. Nevertheless, before Saturday’s practice, Aces coach Becky Hammon reminded players who they were going up against.
“It looks like an NBA roster,” she said of New York’s length. “It really puts into perspective how big they are and how mobile they are.”
She put the wingspan of each of New York’s starters on a board. Liberty wing Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s wingspan of 6-foot-3 and 3/4 inches is nearly four inches longer than her 6-foot height. Rookie wing Leonie Fiebich stands 6-4 with a wingspan to match. Center Jonquel Jones, who is 6-6, has a nearly 6-10 wingspan.
Then there is Stewart, the two-time WNBA MVP.
She issued a correction to the Liberty’s media guide, which lists her at 6-10 3/4. “I thought my wingspan was 7-1,” she said, extending her arms in a postgame interview. “We’re going to have to confirm with the New York Liberty to re-measure that.”
The size and mobility played immediate dividends for the Liberty. They constantly switched on defense and scrambled when necessary to close out on open Aces. New York disrupted Las Vegas’ pick-and-roll actions. And when the Aces tried to drive baseline? “It was not good things happening,” Hammon said, adding that New York cut off corner opportunities, too.
Stewart’s wingspan made a difference on offense as well. She scored 20 points in the first half and passed Lisa Leslie for the longest streak of double-digit performances (35) in WNBA postseason history. “She had too many mismatches,” Hammon said. “We were switching guards onto her and (Jones) in the first half, and we’re not supposed to do that. They destroyed us in there. Both the bigs.”
Jones finished with 13 points and 12 rebounds. And though Fiebich added only 6 points, she was plus-19 in 35 minutes, leading New York in plus/minus for the third consecutive playoff game. Fiebich is still new to the Liberty’s starting lineup. Before New York’s first-round series last week against the Atlanta Dream, Liberty coach Sandy Brondello started her and moved Courtney Vandersloot to the bench. Brondello said she wanted two playmakers on the floor at all times. But the move had other benefits: Because of Fiebich’s size, strength and length, New York can switch almost any screen defensively. (Sunday’s starters had a plus-85.2 defensive rating in the regular season.)
Fiebich opened the series against the Aces guarding Plum. Afterward, the 24-year-old German rookie wasn’t pleased with her performance. “I’m such a perfectionist on defense that I didn’t really feel like it was great defense,” Fiebich said.
Still, Fiebich repeatedly disrupted other Aces when scrambling around the floor. Most notably, Aces guard Chelsea Gray was hounded by Fiebich at the end of the third quarter and was unable to get a shot off.
Afterward, Vandersloot thought back to one of her earliest memories of Fiebich, seeing her switch onto a center in an early-season contest. “It’s not really a mismatch,” Vandersloot said she thought to herself. “What a luxury that is to have her be able to guard the smallest girl on the floor and then switch out onto somebody without having to get into rotations.”
Of course, the greatest luxury of all for New York is Stewart, who laughed afterward about how hard it is to find long sleeves that fit.
There is an old adage in basketball: You can’t teach height. At this point in the playoffs, you can’t teach length either. Instead, Hammon and her staff will be tasked with trying to counteract New York defenders’ arms. A possible solution?
“You gotta spread them out,” Hammon said. “You gotta get to space. You have to space, and the ball has to move. If the ball doesn’t move, and we grab it and we analyze, their length becomes an issue again because everybody recovers back to their own.”
In theory, Las Vegas knew what was coming on Sunday as well. Aces guard Jackie Young said she knew that New York’s length would affect shots and passing lanes. Gray said it forces players into higher release points on their shots. “That poses a challenge at both ends,” Gray said.
And it did. Gray scored only 4 points on 2-of-7 shooting.
Game 2 is Tuesday evening in New York. Hammon called it “do-or-die.” But at least for one afternoon, the two-time defending champion Aces couldn’t stop what they knew was coming.
New York fans inside Barclays Center waved their arms (and white towels) in delight as the final seconds ticked off the clock. Liberty arms were all over the imprint of Game 1. “They punched us in the nose,” Hammon said. “No doubt about it.”
(Photo of Breanna Stewart: Evan Yu / NBAE via Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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